The Removers: A Memoir (15 page)

Go to the door. Two middle-aged women trying to see in, daughters of the deceased. “Hello.” Lips pursed. Slight bow. Concierge of their grief. “Can I show you around before we sit down?” Lead them to the showroom. Urns are fondled. The shopping element of these arrangements seems to calm the grieving. “This one? This is a cloisonné urn. It also comes in a smaller keepsake size.”
Cloisonné
means “little walls.” “Those? Those are charms that we can fill with cremated remains. The teardrop’s popular. And the heart. You can get them in either silver or gold. Would you like to see the chapel?” Walking. Sunshine through stained glass. “It seats up to seventy-five. It’s nice, right? And we can arrange for a priest or minister, or you can. Whatever’s more comfortable for you. And this next room—Let me just draw the blinds in here first.” I get to the window before they see, in the foreground, a cardboard casket lined up in front of a cremation machine, in the back, Larry in the office biting a hard pretzel. “This is the family witnessing room. Behind the blinds is where the cremations happen. Some people, for peace of mind, want to witness the start of their loved one’s
cremation. Other people, that idea does not appeal to them. It’s completely up to you.”

This is how arrangements go. Presenting options. Staying low key. Seeming in charge of possibilities. Using the numbness to death that comes with the business as a tool for good.

Hmong Buddhists from a temple in Kensington come nearly every Saturday. Dave and Omar have Saturdays off, so I’m left in charge. A hundred people swamp the chapel, fifteen or twenty more in the narrow witnessing room. They bring grocery bags filled with sandwiches and cans of soda to make a day of it.

When the incense has been burned, after the prayers have been sung, Larry and I wheel the casket through the doorway onto the cremation floor. All the attendees follow and form a semicircle around the open mouth of the machine. Larry and I roll the casket into the hearth, which elicits wails from the crowd. When I lower the door and it finally thuds shut, the wailing grows. I turn to the funeral director and mouth the word “Okay,” and he pats a boy on the back.

The boy, maybe twelve years old, dressed in an orange monk’s robe, his head newly shaved, steps forward. It seems the eldest boy of the youngest generation is the one who must start the fire. He looks at me as he approaches. Trembly lips. I nod and raise my finger to the control panel and let it rest on the green button. His eyes say, “Don’t make me do this.” I nod in a way that I hope says, “You’ll be okay.” He takes a deep
breath. He pushes the button. An awful metallic whine rises up, igniting screams from the gathered. The monks lead the mourners in chanting. The boy steps back, sobbing, buries his head in a woman’s chest.

I started to get thank-you notes in the mail. With women I dated, I only ever believed my actions would come to bad. Everything was headed to pain when they sniffed out how absent I was. With families, I started to see that I could steer a situation the other way. I was helping them through a few of the worst days of their lives. The irony of course is that none of this was ending well for the families. They were going through the worst loss, and I was finding in it my salvation.

It was this small trickle of good feeling about myself, the hints at competence, that led me to apply to graduate school.

Insights came, stuff that had passed me by on the job the first time, before I’d gone to California. I saw how Omar and Dave’s fighting was secondary to the point, that they got their work done, and it was good and helpful work. And it let me see the same was true for my parents. They didn’t get along, they were passive and screwy in how they handled their falling-out, but the bigger point was that they raised two kids who were relatively thoughtful, decent, not actively involved in harming other people. I spent so much time looking for reasons to tear them down, but the truth was that they’d succeeded at rais
ing their kids, without the benefit of much money, without the benefit of having any idea of how to communicate. They were both kind, wary of conflict, sensitive—the worst people for working out trouble. It was their fate to be different from each other in ways they couldn’t reconcile.

My mother’s father has a heart attack on Thanksgiving, a few days before I turn thirty. He’s eighty-seven. It feels likely from the beginning that he’ll die in the hospital this winter. One night we go back to Mom’s house for a late dinner after visiting hours. She’s inching up on sixty. Her hair’s gray, but she’s naturally tanned and somehow getting prettier with age. She carries herself—her smile, her understated jewelry, her tasteful clothes—like someone with money, with ease in her life. Of course she’s not. She runs a Catholic school in the city where she’s in charge of a few hundred kids, a few dozen employees, and the financial health of the institution. She seems equal parts drained and charged by having the welfare of so many people on her back. For most of the school year she leaves her house in the dark and returns in the dark. She makes less than a mailman, but she wouldn’t change it. She’s become the ideal version of herself, a person whose energies are almost completely devoted to others, without my dad around.

After we eat she goes to bed. I have no one to go home to so I stay and watch the end of the Sixers game. They suck—back in the generation-long rut where the best they can do is make
the last playoff seed, but still we watch, Gazz and Wilbur and I. Still we pay for tickets to justify hanging out.

Before I leave I check on her. Her bedroom door’s left open, like always, like Oakland Street. The TV’s on but her eyes are closed, a thin black void between her lips, the muscles in her face given over to serenity. In her face I see my grandfather, I see his deathbed, and I see hers, too. Some stooge in a suit will untuck that bottom sheet one night and be gone with her in thirty seconds. If he’s like me, he’ll stop at Arby’s on the way back to the funeral home. A pulse of foreboding contracts my middle. I exhale. Her eyes open. “Are you going?” she says. She’s fine. Years, decades before her death.
Live, Son.
I say, “Yeah, I’m going.”

7

Dad asked me to lunch a few days before Christmas 2007, a few weeks short of his sixtieth birthday. But even with his great wavy hair all white now, even with the wrinkles framing his eyes and his hands’ creeping liver spots, he looked better than his age. We walked around downtown, got lunch, went into the Bourse. He bought chocolates for his girlfriend. We walked through the Curtis Building and checked out the Tiffany mosaic there. When we were back near my apartment, I walked him to his car, and as he was saying good-bye he said, “I think we’re going to get married.”

A body blow. I took a second while he scanned my face. “Really?” I said to him. I wanted to pretend to be happy for him, but I failed instantly. I felt like a brat, but I couldn’t help it.

“Yeah. We’re really happy, buddy.”

I wanted to let him have it, but the only words I could manage were “Do you have to do this at Christmas? You know I’m going to be the one who has to tell Mom, right?”

He said, “I want you to know I really love her.” For a moment I felt confused and maybe elated. Did he mean Mom? I felt this weird hope rise in me. Was he saying I could talk him into making a case for going back to Mom? “She’s really good for me,” he said, “and we want to get married.”

It had been seventeen years since he’d lost his job at La Salle. I had just turned thirty-two. I was fourteen when he was fired. I’d become a man, sort of. I’d spent nearly fifteen years since high school scuffling. Working a job I didn’t want. Taking ten years to finish college. Having consistently and sometimes stupendously failed with women. And here he was, not miserable but, it felt to us, the carrier of our misery. That was the one thing we had to get past. We had to say to ourselves and mean it: he is not the cause of our misery. That he was the only one of the four of us who was happy at this late date, galling as it was to admit, was only our fault. Mom, Theresa, and I were still stuck in the trauma of 1990, and he had crashed, burned, and reemerged. He had found a woman and was choosing a second chance at a family. It was like the universe was offering him a window back into the moment things turned sour for him. His girlfriend was forty-one, her son fourteen, the same ages my mother and I had been when he was fired. But because we had moved so little beyond that point, it felt like his coming marriage was a betrayal. Our guts told us he was leaving us for his new wife, when really he’d
lived alone for five years before he even met her. How many more years would we let pass like this, still so vulnerable to someone who meant us no harm?

After Dad’s news, a thought surfaced: my parents don’t need me in town anymore. Dad had ended the gridlock. And maybe I was never needed as much as I thought. But the possibility of Mom and Dad getting back together was ending officially. Six weeks after he told me of his wedding plans I was accepted to school in North Carolina.

The thing I discovered in my late approach to growing up is the peace in realizing there is nothing special in the traumas that form us. Some children have parents die, some see siblings die, some commit murder, some see their parents split. This is to say nothing of what war does. We cherish the particulars of our past, these events that cause our pain, but the liberation comes when we start to see how every living person has gone through something that has changed him or her, and that becoming an adult is based on response. If there were ever a measure put on the value of a life, that’s what it would weigh: response. How one responds to trouble. How quickly. With how much goodness. How much strength.

8

People have asked me, knowing I spent late nights at work alone in a building with maybe eight corpses in the holding room, three being actively burned, four whose bones needed pulverizing, one laid out embalmed in the chapel for the next morning’s viewing, if I encountered ghosts there. I’ve always found it silly. What amount of vanity would compel a dead man to follow his body? Home is the place to look.

“I had a relationship with a student,” my father said. It had taken me forever to ask him what happened at La Salle more than twenty years ago—I was already finished with grad school—and now he was on the phone revealing his secret the
first time I’d dared broach it, like it wasn’t a secret at all. “We had a romance,” he said. His voice sounded like rare meat. “It wasn’t even physical, but a real romance.” And then he added, “A terrible mistake.”

My father’s first book wasn’t published until three years after he was fired. Instead of announcing the start of a punchy career, it felt more like a requiem for so many kinds of promise. But the book’s a gem, full of funny, honest poems written to the people he loved. On the whole we see a poet awash in appreciation for the gifts of family life. There’s one though called “Summer of ’88” that hints at trouble between my parents. (Maybe. Of course the speaker should never be taken for the poet himself.) But this one features a narrator up late at the kitchen table, reading, listening to the Chieftains on his Walkman. This is my father. The poem includes the line “poor dead Wallace Stevens, so married, so alone.” It’s maybe the only crack in the book’s general angle of marital content.

I don’t know what went on between my parents in the years before he was fired, but to think that he lost his reputation, his income, all his goodwill at home, for an unconsummated romance seems too much. How many men and women have romances outside their marriages that ignite and fizzle and no one’s the wiser? If he hadn’t been fired, who’s to say his marriage wouldn’t have healed in time? How much different would everything else have been?

After he told me, I brought up the time I’d met a teacher from La Salle who’d asked about “that woman.” I reminded him that when he told Theresa and me the news he said he’d made students feel uncomfortable, said he’d touched their shoulders and knees. I told him I’d always been confused. So was it an affair with one woman or the harassment of students? Had he been accused of being a cheater or a predator? I had always wanted to know, but I had never wanted to learn.

He said that the administration had talked to “every female student I’d ever been nice to” and bullied them into saying he’d made them feel uncomfortable.

“And you didn’t have tenure,” I said. “They could fire you.”

When we hung up I saw that the details, this far gone, didn’t matter to me as much as I’d always thought. I was happy we’d talked, sad for the small, tender patch on which our lives had pivoted, sadder still for not having been brave enough to ask him sooner and relieve him of his silence.

When I was a toddler, a summer night would find my parents—one on the sofa, one on the love seat—lounging in shorts and bare feet. Many nights they were watching the Phillies on TV or listening to the game on the radio while they read. When I was still of the age—say two or three or four—that it was more natural to be on the floor than in a chair, I liked to wrap myself on their bare legs. I remember the smell of my
mother’s legs—the soap and fresh sweat and something else sweet and unnameable—and their smooth feel, and I remember small pricks in my chin from the shaved hair on the soft curve of her knee. I would press my nose to my young mother’s calf and breathe in its scent. I would touch her toes with my fingers. Smell her ankles. Trace the arches of her feet. If I’m nearly three in this remembrance, she is twenty-nine. She can only bear so much of this hanging on, and if I lick her foot she jumps, and the game is over.

My father’s legs are covered in black hairs the shape of a capital C. He has Cs on the tops of his big toes, too. Now I breathe in deeply the scent of his ankles. Sometimes I travel my tongue along the tops of his toes and he picks me up quick.

We have no wrinkles, no pains, no white hair. We have no brown spots on our arms. We are dark-haired, smooth, soft, strong, bright. We have a garden. We have Paul Simon and Billy Joel. We are not retired. Dad goes to La Salle to teach. Mom goes downtown to work as a secretary. I go to nursery school to learn.

My parents’ smell is not like the honeysuckle in the yard. It is not like the chicken Mom cooks for dinner. It is not the smell of my Raggedy Andy doll’s head. It is not my granny’s cold cream. It is not like a rose in bloom or perfume or the hosed-down black soil beneath the tomato plants. It is, though, like my wrist and fingers and the back of my hand. When I’m put to bed, I have taken to licking these and breathing them in. It means my parents are here with me even as they watch TV downstairs without me.

Now I see myself as a young man, in a bedroom, breathing in the fragrance of a woman’s neck. I’m kissing her, stroking her hair away from her face, sinking to glide my tongue along her thigh, trying, I see now, to propel myself back to the living room floor and to my parents’ bare legs, to kiss myself back to their toes, their gentle fingers on my head, their low voices. Back inside their arms. Back to sleep on their laps. Back to their black hair. Back to pulling dandelions in the garden in the sun while tea bags steep in the jar of water on the low brick wall. Back to my arms around their necks. Back to before my sister came. Back to only me and only them, back to when they were indistinguishable in their love for me so as to be one MomandDad, back to the freshness of their bodies, the freshness of their breath in my ear, the freshness of their holding me, kissing me, the freshness of their saying my name and protecting me. It’s okay. It’s okay, buddy. You’re okay. Quiet now. Quiet. It’s okay. I’m here. I’m here.
I’m here
.